Place Last Seen

""Maggie is lost."" The matter-of-fact urgency of McGuinn Freeman's opening sentence sets the tone for her solid debut novel. The young Baker family is hiking in the Desolation Wilderness of California's Sierra Nevada when their six-year-old daughter, Maggie, who has Down's syndrome, goes missing while playing hide-and-seek. The ensuing drama unfolds from multiple points of view. Maggie's 30ish artist mother, Anne, her architect father, Richard, and her eight-year-old brother, Luke, are joined in their search by members of the official rescue team, and as the search progresses, the personal traumas of each character emerge. Steve, the middle-aged team leader, is under pressure to keep everyone focused, and Ed, a misanthropic search expert, uses a combination of intuition and expertise to find missing people. Ed hasn't seen his own son, a boy about the same age as Maggie, for three months, since his estranged wife took him away with her. As each night falls, as does the autumn temperature during the three-day search, all parties grow increasingly anxious. Anne and Richard replay the sequence of events that led up to Maggie's disappearance, and feel additional guilt because their daughter has special needs. Luke blames himself for not keeping a closer eye on his younger sister, and as they wait for developments, he sets about building a fort, ""a place he can put Maggie in so she can never get out, never wander away."" Attitudes toward the ""mentally challenged,"" the intricacies of search and rescue, and the terrible randomness of fate are all poignantly explored here. With its evocative forest setting and unexpected ending, Place Last Seen (the official term for the spot where the missing person was last sighted) is a cinematic page-turner. Regional author tour. (Mar.)